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For decades James N. Porter was at the heart of digital storage industry. He was the first full time digital storage analyst and a dedicated volunteer and promoter of digital storage organizations, devices and applications. Jim’s fascination with digital storage began when the industry was in its infancy. His amazing story and the help and companionship he gave to generations of participants in the digital storage industry ended on Friday March 2, 2012.

As Jim liked to say “the first disk drive he ever saw was the first disk drive.” He worked at Crown Zellerbach in the late-1950’s when one of the first RAMAC disk drives was delivered there. This amazing device was able to store about 5 million bytes of information in a device the size of a commercial washing machine with 50 two foot diameter disks.

Jim’s continued interest in digital storage led to his joining Memorex, a storage device pioneer, in 1968, serving in a variety of marketing management positions through 1971. After experience with early hand- held calculators at Rockwell International, with the first consumer video tape recorder at Cartridge Television, and with the original computer controlled video editing systems at CMX Systems, a CBS-Memorex joint venture, he began his own management consulting business in 1974.

In 1977 Jim founded DISK/TREND, Inc., publisher of market studies of the worldwide disk drive and data storage industries. Jim and his small team at DISK/TREND created detailed and educated reports on hard disk drives, floppy drives, optical storage and even disk drive arrays.

In addition to his formal report Jim acted as a consultant to the management of many data storage manufacturers. Jim was a frequent presenter at many industry events including many IDEMA conferences, the Head and Media Technology Review Conference, the 100th Anniversary of Magnetic Recording and Information Storage at Santa Clara University (SCU) as well as other events put on by the Institute of Information Storage Technology at SCU, and at his own DataStorage Conferences.

Jim was one of the founders of the disk industry equipment trade group, IDEMA, and actively participated in its conferences and various committees. Jim organized the hard disk drive history exhibit that graced the annual USA Diskcon conference for many years. He was also a founding contributor to the Computer History Museum History Center in Boston and then was a member of the Computer History Museum (CHM) when most of the artifacts from Boston were moved to Mountain View and combined with local historical equipment, including one of the original RAMACs. For many years Jim served as chair of the CHM’s Storage Special Interest Group and was responsible for many interviews of prominent storage industry people including an interview with flash memory manufacturer, SanDisk founder, Eli Harari.

After closing his analyst business about 2000, Jim intended to focus his time on finishing a book on the early days of the hard disk drive industry, in particular about the early days of Seagate Technology and Conner Technology. Although this book was never finished he was a regular participant in and organizer of conference sessions. He was on conference advisory boards for IDEMA events, The Head and Media Technology Reviews, the Flash Memory Summits and the Storage Visions Conferences that I put on. Jim was a faithful champion of these events and never missed a conference on digital storage if he could help it. He was also a frequent attendee at IEEE Magnetics Society conferences and local Santa Clara Valley IEEE Magnetics Society chapter meetings.

Jim Porter was familiar to most people who have spent some years in digital storage. He was always a gentleman in his interactions with his colleagues, although he was not afraid to voice his convictions. He tracked the early history of the storage industry and his market reports and industry tales tell the story of the companies and interesting people who developed the amazing web of storage technologies for holding and keeping the vast bulk of human knowledge. The many people that knew him and had a chance to work with him will miss Jim’s humor, energy and community spirit. Personally, I would have liked to see what he would have written about the early hard disk drive industry and the characters that created it.